Macs, Modularity and More

IPv6, Jenkins, ZFS et al

It's been a busy period of my life over the last month or two, as you can tell from the general lack of updates that have occurred here. I've been covering the recent debacle with Hudson and Jenkins over at InfoQ, as well as ensuring that my systems are up and running for IPv6 for the upcoming IPv6 world day. I've even enabled alblue.bandlem.com to point to a combined IPv4 and IPv6 accessible host, by changing the CNAME to point to ghs46.google.com instead of the previous ghs.google.com. On the plus side, if you're reading this, then chances are your connectivity is working fine (albeit potentially with an IPv4 fallback). On the other hand, if you're not reading this via alblue.bandlem.com but rather a feed reader, you might just want to check it out and let me know if there are problems.

ZFS took a leap over the Xmas holidays but whilst the MacZFS codebase was upped to 77, there's still a few teething problems which makes it unsuitable for a release right now. Unfortunately I have had to spend time on other things so I've not managed to get that out of the door just yet; for those that are interested and want to debug, the code is at GitHub in the untested branch.

I'm working a lot more with Java and OSGi these days and I'm getting my teeth into some interesting problems. I have a few back-catalogue posts queued up about Virgo, which is turning out to be a great OSGi training wheels application server. Since it's so much like Tomcat (and hey, uses Tomcat internally) it makes it much easier to convince others who are used to the Tomcat management of drop-n-go to try out OSGi. The puzzle is missing the JNDI piece at the moment for registration of DataSources; once that gets bundled in with the Virgo download (particularly if the admin console makes it easy) then it will be a cinch to start convincing others to give it a go.

I've also kicked the tyres on my iPhone app, Naughty Step, which is a 1-to-5 minute graphical countdown timer, suitable for letting young kids watch (if not actually hold) so they have an idea of how long left to sit. It's also possible to use it for other timer measurements, provided you want to measure in a whole number of minutes. The new 1.1 release is universal, though I don't think it's likely that anyone wants to run a timer on an iPad. (Kid not included.)

I do have a couple of other iPhone apps in development as well, but they're not in a suitable position to post up on the App Store at the moment. I'm spending a bit more of my time in the evening doing iPhone coding now, so hopefully this will happen in the near future. (It's also one of the other reasons why the ZFS development has slowed down somewhat.)

Anyway, I'm still alive for now(although I get that officially confirmed next week at my semi-annual checkup), and whilst my blog posts have been few and far between, I'm still keeping myself active and busy. Oh, and reading Lord of the Rings (again) which no doubt eats up more of my preciouss waking hours.